Semi-Detached (36 page)

‘I’ll
kill you, I swear it!’ The voice had become slightly hysterical.

‘It’s
Dee’s old boyfriend. He gets mad. She’ll send him away.

Whew. That
Frank. So Geoffrey could climb up on the roof and run across the chimney pots
then.

Dee was
now calmly telling Frank to go away, or she would have to call the police
again, and he would remember what happened last time. My friend turned softly
to me.

‘Come
back to bed,’ she whispered. But I was fully dressed and somehow I was thinking
about the school bus and my British friends.

I
became close to Geoffrey but ended the tour resentful of him. We had a few days
left before we went back to England. It seemed a good time to go off and
explore the States together. But Geoffrey went to New York to catch up with Dee
instead. This was no good. He was my new soul mate, but Geoffrey dropped me for
some intimate, grownup, mature thing like a proper relationship with a girl. I
felt betrayed. I was having too much fun to have to spend hours talking
sensibly with one woman.

Besides,
I had all the responsibilities of my own proper relationship waiting for me
back in England. Was I quite ready for this? It had been prearranged. The
spring term beckoned, and Charlotte and I began a fierce skirmish that was to
last seven years, with intermittent periods of ceasefire.

From
the very beginning, I loved her. I loved so much about her. I loved her
straightforwardness, her handsome good looks. I loved her briskness and drive
and enthusiasm. I loved her bonkers impetuosity I loved being with her. I liked
her settled existence in Newnham. She was a pusher of Earl Grey tea and a
fierce advocate for the importance of civilized trappings — new to me, but I
loved it. Her friends were not only called Cassandra, they were called
Penelope, Hero and Oenone, as if their distempered corridor was some Greek
grove, and I liked that. I loved the fact that, like me, she fussed very little
about the notion of coupledom. I loved her determined domestication. I loved her
courage. Where I would nervously approach the water hole of social insecurity
Charlotte had the conviction of a cobra, the fastidious discrimination of a
lynx and the loyalties of a water buffalo.

She was
to be my education and my indivisible self for nearly a decade. And I disagreed
with her about absolutely everything — degree, value, commitment and intent. Everything.

One
night, after I had shared the neatly embroidered, bevelveted and cushioned
tidiness of her existence for some time, we left a production at the ADC on our
bicycles (Charlotte naturally had a splendid antique sit-up-and-beg version
with a wicker basket in the front). We turned left up Bene’t Street. It was one
o’clock in the morning. A young policeman hailed us. He was quite calm. ‘Were
you aware you were cycling the wrong way down a one-way street in utter
darkness without any lights at all?’ he asked.

Cravenly,
I was ready to apologize. But Charlotte felt a pressing need to say something.

‘You’re
enjoying this, aren’t you?’ she started in an admirably forthright tone. ‘Haven’t
you got anything better to do than
harass
us!’ She grew a little more
strident. ‘We’re not harming anyone, there’s no danger, but no! You have to
stop us!’

It was
fantastic. A
mélange
of Margaret Rutherford and Vanessa Redgrave, it
somehow gave the status of ‘the pigs’ a social nuance as well. He didn’t take
it well and grimly took our details. We were eventually handed a fine we could
scarcely afford, though I seem to recall that Charlotte continued to rant on about
abuse of police power as he scribbled. When we got back to her room, it was my
turn. I became incandescent with rage and, as became increasingly common, we
enjoyed a mouth-watering, life-enhancing five-hour row.

Charles
Maude called Charlotte ‘la Belle Dame Sans Merci’. It was elegant. Others knew
her as ‘Shut-Up Charlotte’, because that was how I habitually addressed her.

Whenever
we were together (and we feared minor traffic fines because we increasingly
spent time spending non-existent money on dog-meat moussaka in restaurants),
friends would quietly remove the cruet and breakable plates.

‘I
remember the time Rory and you pushed me into a ditch after a May Ball and just
left me there,’ Charlotte recalled, thirty years later.

‘I
suspect it was more likely that you fell in the ditch in a drunken stupor and
they just walked on,’ said Jonathan, her husband.

But we
had a fierce attachment too.

‘Apart
from having a thing about Michael I was faithful to you for seven years.’

‘Yes …
What thing about Michael?’

‘You
must remember.’

I didn’t.
I know who Michael is now He is that tall, bald bloke with the strange taste in
ties who runs a major institution. But I thought I had met him for the first
time at a fund-raising dinner. He was always rather cool towards me, but I put
this down to the natural disdain that the director of a world-famous
institution who wore frock coats would entertain for a low comedian. I had no
idea that it might be because my girlfriend had a thing about him when we were
students.

‘You were
rather incredible about it. One evening Michael and I were in front of the fire
in my room in Newnham, and it got dark. We were sitting there together in the
gloom and you suddenly came in. And you switched on the light and said, “Hello
you two,” and just sat down at my desk and immediately started writing an essay’

‘Did I?’
It only sounded incredible to me that I was writing an essay I certainly didn’t
remember any suspicion of hanky panky. Jealousy is a strangely permanent stain.
(This was thirty years ago. We’re both married to other people now, with
grown-up kids. So is Michael.) But I take consolation from the fact that I
nearly said hello to the sort of undergraduate who would go on to run important
national institutions after university even though I didn’t know it then and
appeared to ignore him altogether.

Charlotte
was in the meantime perfecting a balancing act between the demands of her
strongly held principles and a hectic social scene. She knew quite a lot of
posh people. We were all invited to a party in the Lake District by someone who
owned a lot of it. I was there as the entertainment, not to present
The
Chinese Airman Reports Back to His Comrades,
but a Footlights cabaret.

I
lodged with a mad vegetarian and ate nettle soup for supper. Charlotte was a
guest in ‘a stately’. She was driven back there afterwards by Hoorays who
crashed their cars for fun. (Cambridge in those days was quite a broad social
mix.) She walked up some hill with Michael, and he got terribly interested in
things, or so I discovered thirty years later. This was all going on behind my
bloody back, while I was performing, without my trousers on, for the benefit of
some of Charlotte’s poncey friends who never liked me anyway.

I met
plenty of proper public schoolboys at Cambridge. I assumed that their louche
assurance was a direct result of their education. How great to know how to
behave. How comforting to have the assumptions of your caste so ingrained that
you even know which are proper shoes and which are not, which are the right
shirts to wear and which are not, how to talk to people at dinner parties and
how to belittle them with confident disdain. Naturally, I despised them for it.
I hated them for never having been beaten up in a playground in Harlow because
of the way they talked, for treating ‘going on a bus’ as quite an adventure,
for having no taste in music beyond the sickly sentimental pop they played each
other in their studies. But I envied the easy assurance: I was a trimmer. I
adjusted my sails to the prevailing wind.

‘A
born-again Marxist, he spouts dialectic while sitting at the helm of his father’s
yacht.’ My biography in the Footlights programme was written by the son of a
naval captain from a public school. But of course they were all only pretending
too. They were just better at it. What I liked was the ability to enter all
these worlds, the politics and the theatre, the Pitt Club full of Hoorays and
the poetry society, and find there were always people playing at it. Everybody
was pretending. It wasn’t an elite, it was a cloister. The inanities of
Oxbridge were a background against which anyone could shine as long as they had
the brass neck.

I was
celebrating at the end of a second year. I had been happy to kick on: a fake,
intense Brechtian, a grotesque for the Footlights, a director of spectacles at
the ADC and a party-going sophisticate with a girlfriend too. Nothing seemed to
be falling off as yet.

The
only thing I was losing confidence with was History itself. After two years of
galloping, I was about to face a Beecher’s Brook: Part One exams. Apart from
the papers on Political Thought the whole subject had become a little too
mature and objective for me. Besides, if I was going to read under pressure, I
might at least read well-written literature, instead of mock-scientific turgid
journals (although whether literature would be as susceptible to speed-scanning
as articles on the three-field system in thirteenth-century Leicestershire was
questionable). I had an interview with the director of studies in English,
wrote a trial essay on E. M. Forster and now prepared to jump horses, but only
if I did well enough in the forthcoming exams.

Ah,
yes, those exams. I somehow had to fit ‘Part Ones’ into what was already a
rather busy term. Geoffrey McGivern and I were both in
Chox,
the May
Week revue at the end of the year. It was Geoffrey’s first. ‘All that silly
decadent stuff,’ as he described it.

It was ‘silly’,
because of
Cabaret
and Bryan Ferry. Being camp in public had become
fashionable. But we weren’t camp. We were just spotty undergraduates. The
opening ‘ironic’ dance routine was even less ironic than usual. ‘What do we all
have in common? What do we all do together? If it’s just a bar on your
birthday, or a ten-pound box bound in leather …we eat Chox! Ba — tuppity, tup
tup — baaa…’

We
rehearsed during the Easter vacation, got everything ready, and then took a
break to sit some exacting papers.

My
second summer vacation was fully occupied with the Footlights. In Averham,
where the tour stalled for a week, we decided to re-enact the alcoholic
excitements of
Days of Wine and Roses.
We stayed in dormitories above
the theatre, in a sort of farmyard by a church, under huge electric pylons,
just a few fields away from a massive ditch at the bottom of which the River
Trent slopped along. We had no transport and no pub.

Donald
Wolfit had begun his career at Averham. His bust leered out from a corner of
the stage. But it was understandable that he left. The theatre was merely a
hut with a tin roof. When it rained, it rattled so loudly the audience couldn’t
hear anything the actors said. This might have been a good idea. They had been
shipped in by tractor. The authorities shut up the drinking facilities ten
minutes after curtain down, and it was a long night in the middle of nowhere. ‘Binge
drinking’ is an inadequate description.

Struggling
to place orders for six or seven pints, we had to jostle with our audience at
the foyer bar.

‘You
were a very quiet audience.’

‘We
didn’t like to laugh in case we missed the next joke.’

The
first night we said farewell to the charming old ladies who ran the place, sat
staring at the walls for a few minutes and then forced the padlock on the bar.
We drank ourselves insensible. They were a little upset the following morning. ‘I
know you’re prepared to pay but you must promise you won’t do that again.’ So
we promised and the second night we didn’t even wait until their car had hit
the main road before we took a crowbar to the hatches.

The
audience were being polite. They weren’t laughing because the show was getting
worse. The ‘actors’ in the revue (less inclined to drink) were beginning to
gang up against the ‘writer-performers’ — Clive Anderson, Jon Canter, Martin
Smith and myself (more inclined to drink). We wanted to sort them out. We
wanted them to do the scripts properly: the funny way, as we saw it and as we
had written it. To our annoyance, Geoffrey, who sometimes pretended to be a lad
with us and sometimes to be a camp nonce with them, sided with them.

Thirty
years later he was outraged at the suggestion. ‘I did not. I was the voice of
calm reason!’

‘You
joined the side of the actors.’

‘I wasn’t
with
anybody!’

‘Traitor!
You just pretended to be all grown-up and adult and sided with those bastards.’

‘I
remember you sitting underneath the sink with a saucepan in each hand banging
them together because you couldn’t get your way,’ he said.

I also
remembered crawling through puddles in the pouring rain at three in the
morning howling with rage, but I can’t remember what on earth for. I think we
were on the point of calling the whole thing off, packing our bags or having a
stand-up fight when a telegram arrived: ‘congratulations stop michael white
will present you in the west end stop telephone me stop’.

Geoffrey
snorted. ‘I remember saying I thought we’d be mad to go. We’d be slaughtered.’